Thanks to it being end-to-end and fast-paced, Basketball offers exciting ways for fans to make a little bit of profit when they are enjoying games. We have a Dr James Naismith, a Canadian of Scottish descent who worked at Springfield College in Massachusetts in the United States of America, to thank for the invention of Basketball in 1891.
During these first games, peach baskets were nailed up at each end of the gymnasium as the goals, and that’s how the game got its name!
Money Line Basketball Betting
Money Line markets are the most commonly found and simplest ones for even total newcomers to understand how much the wager is going to cost them. This type of bet is simply putting money down on a particular team to win a game. Odds for a match between the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angles Lakers could look like this:
Golden State Warriors: 3.440
Los Angeles Lakers: 1.365
Here the Lakers are the favourites to beat the Warriors. If you bet $10 on the Lakers to win and they did, you would get $13.65, the money you staked and the extra promised by the odds. But, if the Warriors won, you would forfeit all your money.
But if you wagered on the Warriors to win and they did, you’d get $34.40 back.
Handicap Basketball Betting
Once you’re confident about Money Line betting, Handicap wagers can become a very valuable team in games where 1 team is heavily favoured over their rivals.
Handicap online betting is supposed to counter the perceived bias in ability and is set by the bookmaker. The number is displayed as either a plus or a minus value and is factored into the final score to determine the event’s outcome in terms of the stake. For example:
Houston Rockets: (+7.5) 2.050
Boston Celtics (-7.5) 1.862
If the Celtics win the game (100 – 96), wagers on their Handicap lose because they actually started the match with a deficit of -7.5 points, and this amount gets subtracted from the final score. So, in this case, the game outcome as per the bets is a final score of (92.5 – 96) in the Rockets’ favour. If the Celtics won (104 – 94) they’d still do so as far as the wagers are concerned because they’d have covered the Handicap.
Totals Basketball Betting
Totals betting is also sometimes referred to as Over/Under and deals with the combined sports scored in a game being more or less than a preset number. So, in a match between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Chicago Bulls, you might see:
Over 210.5: 1.962
Under 210.5: 2.110
If you wagered $10 on the game to be more than 210.5 points and the result was a final score of 116 to the 76ers and 98 to the Bulls, making for an aggregate total of 214, you’d see a return of $19.62. If you decided that the total score would be less than 210.5, you would have lost.